If you’ve noticed that your blog loads slowly and you can’t compare it to other fast sites, don’t worry. Generally, the problem can be fixed easily if you investigate and find why does WordPress loads so slowly. You need to make your blog load fast for many reasons, including, the visitor experience.
If you have a fast blog, your visitors will come back again and they will remember it in the Google search result. Another good reason is that you can help Google crawlers to find your pages without issues. You should know that very slow pages can affect your ranking.
Causes for slow WordPress website
Theme problems
Your theme is one of the principal factors that can slow your blog. If you have an outdated theme, then you should update it or use another one, this is not an option, but a thing that you should do. Old themes can break your blog without the need to see them.
For example, your theme will send invalid codes, and settings, to web browsers. As a result, they turn an error that slows down your site.
Another important thing about themes, verify that you use only what you need as functions. In modern themes, you can delete not used functions, you can browse these functions in your theme “function” file. Please forget this step if you don’t have any idea about how to open and edit themes. It’s better to get help from someone who can do the job without causing more problems.
You can scan your theme to find hidden codes and URLs that can slow it down. Just install the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) and the Exploit Scanner and run a test.
Outdated or low coded plugins
Plugins are what makes WordPress the best blogging platform. You can install as many plugins as you want, but only, when you have a fast server and optimized theme.
No matter if you have one, or 50 plugins, we tested the effect of plugins by number, and the impact not higher as expected. The problem is when you install a poorly coded, or outdated plugin, the issues become big problems.
The first thing to verify when installing a plugin is to see the number of downloads and the rating with the last updated date:
This is just an example of thousands of outdated plugins in the WordPress directory. In general, they work, but they can slow your website if you have many of them, coding is changing every day, and plugins with good function now become big issues tomorrow.
So, verify if you have many outdated plugins in your blog, and try to replace them with similar plugins but updated regularly.
If you need to install a new plugin, look at the total number of downloads, and compare it with the ratings. A good plugin should have a great rating with thousands of downloads.
To find which plugin causes the slow loading, you can install the plugin Performance Profiler and run a plugins test. It will tell you all the plugins’ times, and you can easily find the one that causes the problem and uninstall it.
The server response time
You can’t optimize a blog without a fast server, if you’re using free web hosting, then, it’s time to get a professional WordPress web hosting provider. It’s not an option, but a choice that will save your blog from poor quality hosting, with multiple downtimes.
In general, Google developers recommend a response time of fewer than 0.2 seconds. It’s not a rule, but, advice from the leader on the Internet. If you’re using shared hosting, it’s not easy to get that fast response time, so don’t worry about that, but, if you’re using premium hosting, then, you should have that response time limit.
Images and blog Background
If you’re using a background image for your site, then, it’s one of the factors that make your blog too slow. Big images can multiply the normal necessary time to open your blog pages. You can use a simple background texture, and it’s better to be light, but an image for a background will slow your blog without a doubt. Even, if you compress images, the impact of slow loading will still the same.
How to make images load faster on your website?
For posts and pages, you need to optimize all your images and make them helpful, but not big problems for your visitors. A blog that loads in 30 seconds is not what a surfer needs, you can learn how to optimize images in WordPress in easy steps. At the same time, you need to use a CDN service to speedup up the loading time and save the resource on your server. I recommend MaxCDN, they are the best and the cheapest CDN provider.
Pop-ups
If you’re one of those who use any of the pop-up ads, you’re slowing your site without a doubt. That’s a bad type of ad that makes your blog look like any other thing, but not like a blog. So, verify if you’re using any type of these pop-ups and delete them, you will notice an immediate change in your blog loading time.
To summarize
The above steps will help you find what makes your blog load slowly. Just follow them and take a look at this post that will show you how to increase WordPress blog speed in 3 steps. You can monitor your blog speed and compare your tests one by one using the Pingdom tools. It’s a good method to find all your server downtimes and response time.
